Exemplary Manners: Queerness in the Ethics of Punk Rock

There’s this meme that floats around on social media with a quote from Joe Strummer—the lead singer of the Clash and one of the founding fathers of punk rock—explaining what punk really means. The meme usually misquotes him slightly, but not in a way that changes the meaning of the quote.

The original quote, which comes from a 1999 interview with CD Now, was: “In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human being. Fuck being an asshole, what you pricks thought it was twenty years ago.”

I think of that quote a lot because it sums up the truth that a lot of people miss about punk rock. Yes, the music is built on anger and aggression, but not hatred toward innocent people. That anger is supposed to be an expression of frustration at a society that refuses to treat all people as equals. Punk has always meant equality for all people and, while the earliest punk artists may not have had LGBTQ people in mind (although, as I’ll show, some of them did), I’d argue that punk’s inclusivity now has to include the queer community.

There’s another meme that floats around that says “You can’t be punk and also be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic! It’s impossible!”

Early punk artists always stood for racial equality. In the case of The Clash, their music not only sided with racial minorities and the working class, they also sought to celebrate the music of non-white people by both incorporating it into their sound and also by inviting both legendary and up-and-coming artists of color to open for them on tour in an attempt to expose white punks to music they might not be familiar with.

In the early days of punk, it was often common for punk bands to play around with Nazi imagery in an ironic way, but that pretty much stopped after real Nazis started showing up in the scene. One of the biggest names in Nazi “punk” was the band Skrewdriver, which was fronted by Ian Stuart. Stuart flew under the radar so much that even the original lineup of his band didn’t realize their frontman was a fascist until after he broke the band up and reformed it with a new lineup.

In fact, they were considered so innocuous in their original incarnation that they once opened for The Police. But once Stuart started letting his Nazi flag fly, the response from the punk community was overwhelmingly opposed to Nazis in the scene. One might even say that the response was disproportionate to how few Nazi “punk” bands actually existed.

The Dead Kennedys put out a song in 1981 called “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Despite only clocking in at 63 seconds, the song became an anthem for anti-fascism in the scene. To this day, I can count far more “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” patches that I’ve seen at shows than I can count Nazi “punks” I’ve actually met. And that’s the way it should be.

Much like the way people argue over whether the United States Constitution—and particularly the 14th Amendment—applies to queer people since the framers of the Constitution clearly didn’t have us in mind, the same argument comes up around punk. LGBTQ rights weren’t a mainstream political issue when punk was invented in the mid-1970s (although, as I pointed out in my history of queercore from last year, there have been queer people in punk since its founding), so why should modern punk support queer people? But, again, just like with arguments over the Constitution, it doesn’t much matter what the founders had in mind. Punk has to evolve over time and, if the punk rock desire for human equality doesn’t apply to LGBTQ people in 2023, then it never really existed.

While I can’t pretend that Joe Strummer, my favorite punk rock icon, was always perfectly enlightened when it came to LGBTQ people, he did seem to come around to the idea of queer equality in his later days. In 1999, on his song “Diggin’ the New” from his solo project, Joe Strummer, and the Mescaleros, Strummer sang, “You gotta live in this world/Go diggin‘ the new/Live in this world/Boy, tran or girl.”

Now, is “tran” the correct term for transgender people, even by the standards of 1999? Is it a gender? Is it even a noun? Hell, is it even a word? No on all accounts. But, while Strummer got his language completely wrong, he was a man from an older generation trying to be inclusive of transgender people in 1999, decades before transgender rights would become a mainstream issue.

Today, queer punk is on the rise, with more and more bands representing as part of the LGBTQ community. Punk has to stand behind them, just like it absolutely has to stand behind the Black Lives Matter movement and all other movements that stand for marginalized people. There’s a risk of falling into a “True Scotsman” fallacy here where you define everything that doesn’t fit your argument as not being part of the group, but punk has always had ethics and an ideology in addition to a musical style.

To support heteronormativity is to accept the dominant ideology of society, which is decidedly not a punk rock thing to do. As a proud member of both the punk community and the queer community, I remind punks everywhere that being queer is one of the most punk rock things you can do, and hating people for being who they are is definitely not in keeping with the spirit of our community.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash